As Congress enters a crucial week with resistance stiffening against a health care overhaul, President Barack Obama dramatically altered his tone, using rhetorical urgency in an attempt to change the dynamic among lawmakers.
In a news conference slated for Wednesday, Obama is expected to maintain a campaign-style tenor he used in a White House statement Friday. It is a familiar tactic for the president, employed successfully earlier this year to pass a $787 billion stimulus bill.
“I realize that Washington is often focused on the 24-hour news cycle instead of the long view, and I know that there’s a good deal of that going on right now when it comes to health care,” Obama said Friday at a hastily called event at the White House.
But with Republicans openly calling the stimulus bill a failure and moderate Democrats growing increasingly leery of being rushed along on health care reform, it’s a comparison the White House can ill afford.
“I realize that the last few miles of any race are the hardest to run,” Obama said. “But I have to say, now is not the time to slow down.”
The administration also is focused on the 24-hour news cycle of late, watching its poll numbers drop and scrambling daily events for the president to showcase his renewed policy vigor.
Keeping the president visible also helps to muffle unhelpful developments in the health care debate — notably a devastating assessment on reform by Congressional Budget Director Doug Elmendorf.
The nonpartisan organization warned Congress last week that health care reform proposals under consideration would do little to reduce costs — one of the president’s central objectives.
In response, the administration went into message overdrive, keeping Obama prominent in the daily news cycle with increasingly terse, no-nonsense sound bites from the White House talking up unprecedented progress on health care reform.
He delivered impassioned speeches at two Democratic campaign events in New Jersey and at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People convention in New York.
In a final gesture as the week closed out, the White House announced the prime-time news conference for Wednesday via the online niche site Twitter — a strategy that placed two items for discussion in the weekend news cycle: an upcoming Obama news conference, and the administration’s use of new technology.
Whether the hectic drive to shift momentum pays off in a bipartisan health care reform bill that meets the president’s guidelines, holds off industry opposition and gets Congress on board is an open question.
Even so, the ramped-up style and full-throated urgency are a sharp contrast from the consensus-building, methodical pace Obama embraced at the outset of the health care reform effort.
“This is where they are most comfortable, back in campaign mode,” said Republican strategist Kevin Madden. “What the president is doing now is what he did then — drawing an argument of contrasts and playing against a straw man, saying, ‘I am here to change everything, and everybody against me represents the status quo.’ ”
Soon after taking office in January, Obama pushed in a similar fashion for rapid passage a stimulus bill to help create jobs and spur the economy.
But that $787 billion program has been slow to show results, and the administration is now saying it’s a two-year program that will take some time to fully develop.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs last week bristled at suggestions that health care reform was in trouble, complaining that
Washington scorekeeping was the problem.
“I know that there’s a tendency to keep the final score at the either — hell, in the midpoint of every day,” he said, then added, “Let’s wait and see what the final product is before we declare all the good work of many people is dead.”
